Have you heard of Women In Prison? We’ve been following them for a while and would love to introduce them to you.
Women in Prison is a national charity that supports women affected by the criminal justice system and campaigns to end the harm caused to women, their families and our communities by imprisonment. Their work is of particular interest to us as many Greenham Women were imprisoned for their involvement in the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, and the actions they undertook relating to that protest.
As Lyn says below, women have historically been “punished on two levels. They were punished for the offence they’d committed, but they was also punished because they were seen by the male patriarchal system as having betrayed their sex – as having betrayed femininity.”
Prison for women is frequently just another knock in a life full of them – often literally.
- Women In Prison figures reveal that 70% of women in prison have experienced domestic abuse, and 53% of women in prison experienced abuse as a child.
- University of Glasgow research tells us that 78% of women prisoners in Scotland have a history of significant head injury – most of which occurred in the context of domestic abuse that often lasted over periods of several years.
- The Domestic Abuse Commissioner tells us that, according to government data, at least 57% of women in prison or under probation are survivors of domestic abuse.
Women in Prison tell us that prison doesn’t work for women. As reported in that article, Frances Crook, the then chief executive, of penal reform charity the Howard League said, “[women] typically have more complex needs than men. They are more likely to be victims of abuse, and more likely to have been sentenced for offending related to their exploitation by a partner.
It’s saddening – and maddening – to read that so many issues which have been known about for decades are still present for women today. Below we share quotes (and links to full stories) from Greenham Women who went into prison, including Rosy Bremer who died recently.
“Going to prison hospital in those days was a real – I mean, it was horrific it was just, women who lost their babies there. And doctors who really were not being nice. No, it was – the old Holloway was horrific. But the new Holloway it was more horrific in a different way. It was less human. It was, it was unkinder, I think.”
“My first time I went to prison, I was absolutely terrified. I think because I had all those stereotypes in my head about what the other women were going to be like, what the officers were going to be like, was I going to be bullied like I’d been bullied by girls when I was in care? And as soon as I got to prison, all that was just obliterated – all those stereotypes. Yeah, there were aggressive women. But there was no stereotype of what a woman prisoner was like. And I found I could relate to these women, because they’d had similar backgrounds to me, that a lot had gone through extreme poverty, or domestic violence, or abuse as children. They’d been forced into committing offences because of the conditions they were living in. And not only that, women in prison, women who went before the courts were punished on two levels. They were punished for the offence they’d committed, but they was also punished because they were seen by the male patriarchal system as having betrayed their sex – as having betrayed femininity. So, you’d find that women got sent to prison for offences, quite minor offences, that men wouldn’t receive a custodial sentence for – like shoplifting, prostitution, non-payment of fines. But when I first went to prison, I had all those stereotypes in my head. Um, and as I went to prison more and more often, that’s when I think the seeds of disillusionment with Greenham started, because of the stark contrast between Greenham women in prison, and other women prisoners.
And how I felt – not all Greenham women by any means – but a lot of Greenham women who went to prison, saw themselves as political prisoners. And didn’t acknowledge that the vast majority of women in prison were political prisoners. And there was a demarcation between Greenham women, and the other women prisoners. A lot of that was broken down, the more often women went to prison. But it was still there. And I remember that the last ever sentence that I served, that was 4 months – I’d actually left Greenham it was well over a year since I’d left, when I was gone back into education. And the court case came up, and we got 4 months. But that last sentence, I got moved out to a semi-open prison, while my co-defendant stayed at Holloway. And I found myself scrubbing floors beside this, this, this black woman prisoner, who I knew from the care system in Sheffield. You know, I’d met her in a Remand Assessment Centre when I was 12 years old. And here I was in prison alongside her – it, it and I stopped, and I made – I formed bonds with other women at that prison, who made me question erm specifically, class, I suppose, in a lot of ways. But I started to I mean, from early on that first time I ever went to prison, the first time I ever went to prison, I got sent to prison with an older woman – we hadn’t taken part in the same action, but we’d both been sentenced. I’d got 7 days, she got 14 days, we shared a cell. Oh, god, she snored! And she wouldn’t come out of the cell to mingle with other women, even in association, even on exercise. And I saw that so often. I saw, when other Greenham woman were in prison, if we went out and exercised there’d be a, we’d stick, you know they’d stick together, they wouldn’t be interacting.
Because I had lots of court appearances, and I’d gotten to know a lot of the women, I was on remand with, I used to smuggle out their stories. And that’s how I made contact with an organisation called Women in Prison, and started working with them to get publicity about women, individual women’s stories, and about things that were happening within prisons.
Towards the end of my time at Greenham, and when I left Greenham I became drawn towards penal reform and campaigns about specifically women’s imprisonment.”
“That is the thing about prison. It’s really boring. Literally nothing happens all day. And you’re in a tiny space. It’s, yeah, it was interesting for me as well, because I’d come from a very, you know, rural world up in Kendal – small England, and then lived at the camp, that was it, the entirety of my life, really. And so I suddenly met women who were from whole different world, you know, and different, you know, different experiences, different cultures, different – and it definitely opened my eyes to, you know, the kind of experience of women in the legal system, and who that works for, and who it doesn’t work for, and who ends up in jail and why. And you know how many women are in there really because of economic crimes that are about being poor and trying to manage and, you know, it’s all it was quite – that was a real eye opener for me around sort of class and race that I hadn’t really sort of – I’d begun to think about, but I hadn’t seen so kind of vividly displayed really, so I think that was really interesting. Kind of life changing, really seeing that world.”
“So I learned about being taken into custody, and going through the you know, the, the prison humiliation of being, you know, putting your arms up, being stripped off with people sitting typing in an office right next to you, and all you’ve got is one little curtain that they pull across, and they made you do star jumps and all sorts of things, and then bend over and look up your bum. It was the most horrendous thing I’d ever been through. I just didn’t realise that’s what they did, and as for what they made you wear, that was just criminal – criminal. These nighties with little, tiny little flowers on them, and pink knickers, and oh please, it was awful. It was just abusive. (Laughs).
The woman opposite me had stolen a pint of flaming milk off somebody’s doorstep. She was hungry. She had no, nothing and she nicked a pint of milk. She’d been there 8 months on remand, and it was such an – and the woman over this side was an addict. And it was just like, what in the hell? I expected these to be crazed lunatic women. And I’d gone in with that in mind and realised there were women just like me, they were women just like the women at Greenham. And they were just women. And they had had a lot of unfortunate things happen around them. And one of them was in because the police were shaking her down to try and get her boyfriend to admit to a crime that he’d committed. And it, it didn’t take me very long to realise that I’d had this illusion that these crazed women who killed people would be the ones in jail. There wasn’t – I think there was only one person I met in jail who I thought belonged there, you know, maybe two. And it was almost all about poverty?
And they almost all have… Poverty or addiction. Yeah. And abusive relationships. Yeah. Yeah. And the things that they’d done to get away from them, or to get out of them. And I think that that was an eye opener as well, because I really thought jail was for bad folks, and it so wasn’t. And actually the bad people in there were mostly the screws. And I watched the way that they treated women, the way that they would use, you know, 24 hour lockup we were on when we were first there, and I’d you know, and they were taking us from one area in the prison to another, to another, to another, and it was just hideous. They were just being awful. And we just set about causing as much trouble in there as possible. We, we stopped the searches from happening. But that was more because we were all in a line and the screw was sort of doing the thing, and you have to put your hands up and all this, they were doing that. And one of our crew basically put her hands right over her head – didn’t touch her, and you know, this screw freaked out completely and thought, oh my goodness. So she carries on and does the next person, but this particular woman went down the line and went to the end again – went ‘Me, me me me!’ That was the last time they did searches when we went round through the prison. But there was a lot of stuff that we did, like they, they the way that they would oppress women was just horrible. They would put them on the ward with all those with the mental health problems, and frighten people. They put me on a deportation wing – I woke up with a whole load of women around my bed shaking it, you know, and this was because we weren’t doing what what the authorities were telling us, so they were putting us in dangerous situations – they were prepared to do that. But actually, you know, it was a lot less dangerous, you know, for us because we would – people would tell us about things that were happening and we’d take it on as an issue. You know, it’s like we organised a hunger strike, a rooftop protest. There’s so many things that we did. We had a singing protest, where I was told ‘Stop singing, stop singing.’ So we started singing ‘You can forbid nearly anything, but you can’t forgive me to sing.’ It just sort of – for them that was a bit of a shocker, I think. Having to manage women who didn’t care about their authority. ‘Going to work? No, I don’t think so. I’m not working, why would I work for you?’ You know, we were awkward. We were difficult. We made it hard for them. But that in turn made it easier for the other prisoners, because they were focusing on us instead of them. And I think that we did quite a bit of good in there some times with that, because we didn’t care.
We would ask people ‘Is somebody okay?’ And women were pretty good in prison, they would pass messages round to check where people were. So there was a hell of a network there that we walked into, really. So we used to use their network to make sure that women were okay. Particularly if somebody had been hurt when we’d been arrested and nobody’d seen them. Then we’d ask around, and people used their network to find out who was who was okay. And they would pass it around and make sure you knew. So that was a good thing.”
Helen Steel – also heavily involved in uncovering the Spycops scandal
“They had broken into the base and started dancing on top of the silos, and they were jailed. I can’t actually remember if they’d got convicted for breach of the peace or they were, um, accused of breach of the peace, but they’d basically been jailed to prevent them protesting further. And there were a lot of them in Holloway prison – there might have even been all fourth four. I can’t remember. And I was one of – I don’t really know – a number of women who went to Holloway prison and took part in a protest outside the prison, just publicising the fact that the women had been jailed for protesting against nuclear weapons. And while I was there, er, somebody suggested, or somebody asked if I wanted to take part in a protest on the roof, er… How do you get on the roof? Well, um, early in the morning – long before it was dark, there was some scaffolding on the side of the prison, and we climbed up the scaffolding and then we had to walk along a wall that had at-least a 30 or 40 foot drop either side of it – it was absolutely terrifying. Some of the women just like walked straight along it… So brave. …like it was on the ground! (Laughs). As though there wasn’t a big drop either side. I think I straddled it… Yeah, I would have done that. …and put my hands and arms, and eventually got across. And then we got onto the roof of the, I think it was the gym of the prison. So you broke into Holloway prison, basically? We, yeah, we broke into the prison. (Laughs). And er, we hid on the rooftop until it was dawn, and there got up and danced on the rooftop and hung up banners, er calling for – well the end to nuclear weapons, and for women not to be jailed for protesting against nuclear weapons. How cool is that? What did you sing on this roof? Oh yeah, somebody did invent a song – what was it? I think it was, um, (Sings) ‘We’re all going off to sunny Holloway, no more Greenham for a week or two. We’re all going off to sunny Holloway, no more Greenham for me or you, for a week or two.”
“You immediately become institutionalised in terms of being patted down and all these things. We got out very little – I think there were days and days and days when you didn’t get out at all – you just had your food put through the door. But almost everybody I spoke to when I was there shouldn’t have been there – they were in for petty theft, for food – for nappies, all that sort of stuff. So many women with poor mental health, so many women who’d come from – they were in because they wanted to get away from the violent relationships they were in outside.”
“I ended up working for a group called Women in Prison, which um was promoting rights of women, and trying to support life for women, when they were in prison. Things like suicide watch, things like even getting decent hair products in for women of colour, um everything. And I became part of that because of my experiences in Holloway, because of Greenham.”
“But the whole process – when you get so dehumanising, obviously – just, so dehumanising. I mean I’ve heard it’s a lot better in Holloway now – “better” – in inverted commas, but they would always take you for processing near C wing, I think – where the really scary people were kept. So you’d hear people banging on the doors and screaming, the doors are that thick and they’re bulging – just the whole thing was just designed to intimidate you and really fuck you up before you got anywhere. So the first like, the first day in that cell was six, and then that evening we got our cell for the rest of the week. And I was with two other women, and I was on the top bunk, and there was one over there, and the woman on the bunk beneath me, she’d just had surgery for her kidneys, quite elderly – I thought at the time, black woman, and in the middle of the night she got really, really ill, and I was banging on the door trying to get someone – I thought she was going to die, and the other woman was saying ‘Oh, they’re not going to come, they’re not going to come, you know there’s not point – they don’t give a shit’, so I kept on banging on this bloody door, and eventually someone did come and she was taken away. Really ill. Just all these women – why’s she in there?”
“You go inside Holloway Prison, and 99.9% of women there were there for crimes of poverty. There was a woman who had been claiming her social security and her student grant, and the amount of money they spent to keep her in Holloway was so much more – probably ten times what they lost. It made no sense at all. And she had been picked up shortly after she had given birth to her child, and kept in the er – I think there wasn’t space to keep her on remand in prison at the time, so she’d been kept in the police cells for a few days, and her child had been taken away. And you know, there were so many tales like that. Cruel. Yes, and it was really about controlling women, to about that you’d stolen some great amount of money, or that you’d committed some huge crime. It was crazy to have women in prison for the things they’d done.”
“So prison, yes, it’s a horrible place to be. My abiding memories of prison is it’s just full of women who are very, very distraught, who have very fragile kind of precarious lives.
I remember thinking, why isn’t anybody doing anything about the kind of, the lack of anything constructive or rehabilitative in prison? And I’d heard several very harrowing stories about women’s lives. And I do remember thinking, it’s kind of not right that most people aren’t really aware that that’s what the women who end up being in prison that their lives are like.”
“I met all these women in Holloway who I couldn’t see why they were in there at all – completely ridiculous. Not that – I didn’t think prison’s great before that, and everybody in there is bad, but I hadn’t – it didn’t properly click until I met them. Met the women there, you know, women who’d stolen stuff because they didn’t have enough money, you know, food. Women who had been used as mules for drugs, prostitutes, you know, like, why are they – why are they in prison? They’re not a danger to society. They’re just unfortunate. You know, they need some help – they don’t need locking up. And then, so that was very, I kind of knew that, but I hadn’t met it. You know, I hadn’t met that – I hadn’t fully realised it until I was in the middle of it – how ridiculous it was all these women were being locked up. But you know it, on the whole my feeling was that it just really showed up that you know, the benefits system everything – power relationships between men and women, and how badly women are treated and that’s where they end up.”
“I met people, learnt a lot about the system. And I think I came out thinking absolutely everyone should experience what prison’s like, because maybe we can improve the system. You know, it doesn’t serve any purpose the way it is at the moment.”
“Um, grim processing – strip search, not internal search, but might as well have done – it was so demeaning. Given a little cotton nightie with a frilly collar. And we were in solitary confinement.”
“I think the only thing was that um, even then I thought that a lot of the women that I met, didn’t seem to have done anything very serious and shouldn’t have been in there. Um, I met women who were in Holloway because they didn’t have TV licenses. And some of them had children. So they’d been incarcerated because of that lot, mostly economic for economic reasons. And I remember meeting some women who’d been drug mules. And the only woman I met who maybe deserved to be in there – she, she admitted herself, she sort of said ‘You know, I, I admit, you know, I should be banged up’, and she was an armed robber. And um, she, she kind of um, thought that she deserved it but, er, I think that I did have some guilt after I left, because I hadn’t been there for very long at all. And I used to think about the women who were left behind. And I think there were quite a few that I heard probably come from you know, really difficult backgrounds, and had mental health problems. And so er, I used to worry about them.”
“I remember other women just being in, in terrible situations. You know, there was, there was me who had chosen to go to prison – I probably could have managed to get the money to pay the fine – my friends would have paid it, but I had chosen to go as a political act. And the other women in there hadn’t – so they’d be might be in there for stealing a pair of shoes, for stealing food, for minor drug offenses, and it did feel like a really brutal way to treat people for such ridiculous things. And you could tell that a lot of people were being drugged up, you know to keep them quiet. They were tranquilized, basically to control them and you know, it was a pretty brutal system, but I was treated fine.”
“There was African women who had been caught smuggling drugs, who were doing a sentence before they got deported. And there was women who’d been done for shoplifting and ridiculous things like that who were just like, you know, so had a long, had a long criminal record so they were shoved in in like you know, they’d get short sentences.
And there was a few other you know, maybe there was one other woman who was a lifer, who was really nice. I think she’d probably killed her husband cos he was a bastard. D’you know what I mean? She was really nice.”
“I had a whole bunch of women who would track me down and find me and visit me. And who could raise the funds. I mean, there wasn’t a lot of money sloshing around. But somebody would find some money and there would be you know, I would be visited. There are a lot of a lot, most women in prison for whom that is not the case. Who whose families don’t have the resources to find out where the hell they are, who don’t have the money to go and visit them who don’t have the time to go and visit them if they’re halfway across the bloody country.
There’s this wonderful, wonderful woman who founded and ran an organization called Women in Prison. They do Clean Break and all the rest of it. And Chris, she was called Chris Tchaikovski. And you have never met a more charismatic woman in your life, honestly, on it. Seriously, she’s really extraordinary woman. And her argument was that Greenham women were not so very different from other women prisoners. And I think she was right.”
“I felt quite kind of guilty because I was in there and wasn’t going to be in there for for very long. And I’d got all this support from people outside. And all these other women were in there for what seemed like really kind of minor offences. And when, you know, were not necessarily gonna get out of that situation, you know, even if they were released, they they weren’t, they were still released to a kind of shitty kind of life, where it might happen again.”
“I would say that they took your confidence away from you. That’s what I felt in the prison. And I can see how people get institutionalised very quickly. They’re very sort of, they were very abrupt and unfriendly, the officers. At first I was in with, about, I think I was in with about eight other women with bunk beds, and erm, all kinds of women. But I talked to some of the women there, and they had, you know, they had children at home, but they had taken credit cards and things like that. It, it seemed to me that they shouldn’t have been in prison. I felt very sorry for the women who were in there, because obviously I was, I was only in there for a week, you know. But, you know, obviously, there was some, some women who had drug problems as well. But I just thought it was, and you know, the way that they weren’t allowed to have their children there. But they shouldn’t have been in prison, really. I felt, then, you know, that. It was only about, they hadn’t done anything physical, or hurt anybody. You know, they had just, it was more like fraud, you know, and still stealing cards and things like that. And I just felt it was so unjust, really, because I don’t know where their children went, what was happening to their children while they were in prison, either, you know.”